Advocates for people who use drugs want the province to sign an order allowing people to access a safer drug supply, after B.C.’s coroners announced Thursday that 120 people died of illicit-drug overdose in November, up 13 per cent from the same month last year.

In a report released Thursday, the B.C. Coroners Service said 1,380 people died of an overdose in the first 11 months of 2018, almost a match for the 1,381 during the same period last year, when a total of 1,486 people died. Fentanyl, a powerful opioid being cut into the illicit supply, was detected in about 85 per cent of overdose deaths this year, up from 82 per cent in 2017.

B.C.’s top doctors and coroner have long been calling for a safer supply of drugs so that people don’t continue to turn to the fentanyl-poisoned illicit market.

In February of 2017, Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe said it may be wise to carefully consider a suggestion by the province’s medical health officer at the time to provide medical-grade heroin to the group of drug users for whom nothing else has worked.

Earlier this month, Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart released 23 findings and recommendations from a task force investigating the overdose crisis, which included expanding access to treatment and harm reduction, funding health services for Indigenous people and peer support network, and helping people access a safer supply of drugs.

The report recommended city staff find space in or near the Downtown Eastside for a low-barrier opioid dispersal pilot project to be run by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

Meantime, the PHS Community Services Society will launch a pilot program in early January, where a 50-person cohort can access injectable hydromorphone, a pharmaceutical-grade painkiller similar to morphine.

Karen Ward, a longtime advocate for drug users, said there is no single, perfect solution to the overdose crisis. The pilot programs will help certain people but Ward believes the solution lies in broadly increasing access to a safer supply, beyond the Downtown Eastside.

“People always ask, ‘What’s the hold up?’ Opioids are controlled narcotics and what that means is there are multiple layers of regulation — the College of Pharmacists, individual pharmacists, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the health authorities — for sensible reasons,” she said.

“But now, those narcotics are the safest thing we have.”

Ward said Health Minister Adrian Dix and Addictions Minister Judy Darcy should write a ministerial order that allows service providers to increase access to safer opioids.

She said the order could declare that due to B.C.’s ongoing fentanyl-related public health emergency, “any and all regulatory barriers in the province” related to expanding access to a safer opioid supply are null until the emergency is over, similar to the ministerial order enacted by former Health Minister Terry Lake in December of 2016 which allowed overdose-prevention sites to operate.

“That is something that actually could be done today,” Ward said.

Minister Darcy was not available for comment on Ward’s suggestion Thursday but her ministry said in an email that it is focused on expanding access to a safer supply through opioid agonist treatment, which provides a substitute for street drugs and reduces related harms. The ministry said it intends to greatly increase low-barrier access to the treatment, which is currently used by 240 people in Metro Vancouver.

Asked about Ward’s comments, the Ministry of Health deferred to the other ministry’s response.

Jordan Westfall, president of the Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs, said he believes the two ministries have shown “complacency” when it comes to the ongoing crisis, which he said is demonstrated by the ongoing death toll of about four people each day and other grim statistics in the latest coroners’ report.

“It’s disheartening to say this, but it does not shock me anymore,” Westfall said. “That reflects on our policy-makers and our politicians.”

Westfall echoed Ward’s call for a ministerial order, specifying that he would like to see oral hydromorphone distributed at overdose-prevention sites or prescribed by doctors just like the opioid treatments Suboxone and methadone.

“With alcohol, everybody is assured they can drink a beer and not die suddenly and then on top of that, you have treatment, you have supports,” he said.

“We want to see our drug policy do the same thing. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re going to see any change in the amount of deaths.”

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